INTS 455 Politics of the Middle East and North Africa (Rizkallah)

Welcome to the Correlates of War (COW) project homepage. COW seeks to facilitate the collection, dissemination, and use of accurate and reliable quantitative data in international relations. Key principles of the project include a commitment to standard scientific principles of replication, data reliability, documentation, review, and the transparency of data collection procedures.

Gapminder identifies systematic misconceptions about important global trends and proportions and uses reliable data to develop easy to understand teaching materials to rid people of their misconceptions. Gapminder is an independent Swedish foundation with no political, religious, or economic affiliations.

The CIRI Human Rights Dataset contains standards-based quantitative information on government respect for 15 internationally recognized human rights for 202 countries, annually from 1981-2011. It is designed for use by scholars and students who seek to test theories about the causes and consequences of human rights violations, as well as policymakers and analysts who seek to estimate the human rights effects of a wide variety of institutional changes and public policies including democratization, economic aid, military aid, structural adjustment, and humanitarian intervention.

The updated GSDB (2021) covers 1101 publicly traceable, multilateral, plurilateral, and purely bilateral sanction cases over the 1950-2019 time period. The most recent GSDB includes 381 previously unrecorded sanction cases among which 75 emerged during 2016-2019. Additionally, the GSDB classifies these sanctions on the basis of three important dimensions. First, by the type(s) of sanctions considered (e.g., trade sanctions vs. financial sanctions vs. travel sanctions, etc.). Second, by the political objective(s) behind the observed sanction(s). In particular, the GSDB systematically groups sanction objectives into distinct categories (e.g., policy change, destabilization of a regime, war prevention, human rights, etc.) of recorded policy objectives. Third, by the perceived degree of success for each identified sanction, captured by five distinct categories ranging from failed sanctions to the target's full acceptance of the sender's demands.

The Chicago Project on Security and Threats (CPOST) is a non-partisan research center at the University of Chicago dedicated to advancing scholarship on international politics, security, and trade that advances peace and prosperity. CPOST brings together leading scholars at the University of Chicago conducting rigorous, data-driven research on issues of national and international importance to provide critical knowledge to policymakers, scholars, and the public.

AidData connects decision-makers and researchers who have a shared interest in working together using granular data and innovative tools to solve pressing problems, precisely target resources, and use rigorous evidence to measure the impacts—intended and unintended—of policies and investments.

The World Factbook provides basic intelligence on the history, people, government, economy, energy, geography, environment, communications, transportation, military, terrorism, and transnational issues for 266 world entities.

The World Statistics Pocketbook is an annual compilation of key economic, social and environmental indicators, presented in one-page profiles and selected from the wealth of international statistical information compiled regularly by the Statistics Division and the Population Division of the United Nations, the statistical services of the United Nations specialized agencies and other international organizations and institutions.